I am honestly not surprised by how badly people understand the MMR Reset.
Each season there is a so called soft reset but not a hard reset.
So I’ll explain why this is a bad thing and why it doesn’t work.
Imagine MMR being the price of your electricity, the bill comes as usual and you pay it, that’s your daily gaming.
MMR placement is the current rate of the electricity price, lets say you pay 100$ per season.
The cost of transfer of the energy will be the MMR decay.
Seasonal costs aren’t really accounted for right now due to soft reset.
That means your energy bill every 3 or so months pretty much stays at the same level and price, soft reset means the increase in price is barely noticeable, however the transfer price still increases. What does that mean in gaming ?
Players come and go, some players don’t play half a season others play more than usually for reasons (breaks, vacation holidays days off alignment)
This means the MMR decays is minimal but the changes are RAPID in general in every direction.
In terms of paying the bill, the pricing is usually regulated by law or an office of price regulations (some european countries have those).
Every year they regulate the need to up the price. Normally people don’t want that because in some countries the price of energy is very high already. Soft MMR reset means in this case that the increase of price will be very small, which means the MMR will be adjusted to the current trends, not the current skill of the players. Basically they simply level it to 30% down from 70% growth (just an example).
In terms of paying the bills it means that users will pay 100$ instead of 140$.
From a financial perspective it looks great, but in reality it means that someone else has to pay the difference, usually the firms, companies, and industries pay the bigger bill difference and get back that money by increasing the prices of their goods or services.
The best solution would be to constantly and continuously increase the yearly rate by 5% instead of 40% per year.
This would lower the cost difference of energy transfer every year at a better rate than suddenly needing to hit every single power user by 100% price increase (up from 100$ to 200$ per season).
If you slowly increase the price it won’t be such a burden in the long run because even employers would steadily increase the paychecks.
this is what Blizzard is avoiding, they don’t want to adjust the MMR by resetting it for everyone, they want to feed their top tier players in ranked games and have the lower ranks pay the toll by never leaving their ranks.
An MMR Reset in a hard way would force everyone to pay the same amount of effort to get to the rank they should be in. Unfortunately only the most hardcore players paid by commercialized companies get to do that because they are being paid to play the game and not work, and by doing so they advertise their companies and products.
This is a form of discrimination but hard to point out.
A hard reset would force everyone to always start from scratch, skilled players will quickly get back to their ranks while casual players would be on the lower end.
That is, if Blizzard had the balls to do this. Which they don’t have because of outcry like above this post. People don’t understand MMR so they complain about hard MMR Reset, even if that would give them a better ranking if they worked hard.
Now I say all this but how does current MMR system affect me ?
I’m a Gold 1 player, I’m a casual, but I could do better if I really had the time and didn’t have to actually work for my bread.
Unfortunately, the current system places me in Gold tier and after placement I get matched with bronze 1 and silver 3 players, I never had the pleasure of playing with anyone else on Gold tier, as such I am constantly dropped into bronze tier because I can’t carry the team every single time no matter how good I can be, it’s just impossible.
From some US data you can check with google it shows that GOLD tier is very unpopulated, which means playing with or against GOLD tier players is nearly impossible. For the past year I have been playing on two accounts, this one(my main) and another (ALT).
My alt account still had me in gold tier until last season, there I was dropped into silver and then I just couldn’t get out anymore, this is because my accumulated MMR on that account started to be leveled down to the “standard” tier.
That means similar players to me either stopped playing or managed to increase their ranks (good for them) but a fairly casual player like me couldn’t play on the level anymore. So my MMR got soft reset to match me with someone at all (silver 4) and this season I got dumped at placement to silver 1 (down from gold 2 at placement)
If MMR hard reset was happening every season, there wouldn’t be a problem because everyone would quickly get to their respective tiers.
But thanks to people without an ounce of knowledge about economics, imagination or even understanding how rankings work, whine about it, Blizzard has no balls to do a hard reset.
I hope thanks to this example you understand why MMR got us screwed.
Thanks to everyone who keeps whining about how bad it would be.
Thanks for all the replies.
Please learn to read with understanding, I did not say the previous viper skins were 1,6k.
It states there that skins that were for 1,6k are now 1,8k
Is this confusing ? Ok I’ll explain.
NOT ALL SKINS WERE 2.4k during previous viper series. Now we have (as I have taken a good look at this) skins for 2,4k 1,8k, 1,6k and 1,2k of the same series.
The difference is that some of those skins are old, uglier than expected and some were cheap (1,6K for legendaries) and were unpopular.
I still find teh pricing of 1,6k for legendaries extremely expensive because pretty much every single skin that comes out with an event is legendary tier (skins that come out with map packs or non seasonal events can also get either pricey or cheap down to 600 shards).
So yeah. Activision told Blizzard to milk the hell out of players.
If you think about it, Overwatch players are fine because they PAID for a game and only get boxes as they level up, they don’t give a damn because since they bought a game they are entitled to heroes showing up there for free. In HOTS we have to buy the heroes to get them because we pretty much have to pay for everything in this game, because it’s free to play.
Eventually every player gets to the point of being able to get all the heroes for gold or gems they get every 150 levels, but realistically players in HotS spend a LOAD of time playing this game, and still spending on it.
Technically I spent on this game 49 eu, I bought some skins and a few mounts.
I paid similar money for Overwatch and I don’t need to spend a single penny on it anymore, I get heroes for free and I get skins every so often in lootboxes.
The gains outweigh the cost for me in that game but in HotS the costs outweigh the gains.
I only recently started enjoying this game more when Orphea came around, a new character from the Nexus and I was legit happy because it was fresh.
Then Blizzard started doing their piggy bank rides and I just started losing heart for this game again.
I liked this game, I really enjoyed it, but the DEVELOPER decided to destroy their own creation.
BTW, I prefer Horde for their cool mounts (I play only Draenei in WoW but if they were Horde I would not be in alliance) but if they kill off Jaina, I am closing my account for good.
tornado for multiple seasons that would just end up like it was before, imagine a gold player getting really lucky after a reset, getting carried to masters by GMs on his team or bronze players on the enemy team and then just playing to avoid decay again…
